Monday, December 5, 2011

Now Wait For The Next Adaptation

Word leaked in Variety today that Now Wait For Last Year has been called up out of cold-pack to become the next hot PKD-product in Hollywood (Here's the Cinemablend story). On the one hand, cool! Wait For Last Year is a good novel with lots of neat stuff to recommend it as a Hollywood blockbuster: it's got war, action sequences (I remember someone almost gets thrown out of a helicopter), it's got a love story, and the most substantive moral statement ever made by an autonomic cab in any Dick work (and that's saying something!). On the other hand, I mean, wow! Is there anything they're not going to make into a PKD vehicle? Is there an option on the story of Dick's typewriter yet? Is this just Autofac-style commodification for commodity's sake?

One thing's for sure; the lawyers have, no doubt, double checked that the novel is still under copyright.

5 comments:

I think that's good news.There's nothing sacred, once it's printed it's out there in the open. They may blow it or bend it(Total Recall) or not (Blade Runner), but even the bad ones (if they are successful) can have a "good"-PKDickian influence on the movie industry - if you think that his ideas being copied over & over is good. Some PKD will be in the movie. Probably.[And I just recently watched The Adjustment Bureau - it wasn't very successful over here, so I had to get the DVD - and didn't expect much, but I did enjoy it... and the religious´(CoA) reference may not have been so much "off" when looking at the Exegesis... ]

I'll start complaining when they announce Michael Bay or Brett Ratner as the director. Until then, I'll stay hopeful. At least they're choosing good material. I dread the day that a Dr. Futurity adaptation is announced.

This is my favorite PKD novel, and I've read it many times over the years; the text corrections in the Library of America edition were welcome. I think this one could (in the right hands!) be adapted with the story left intact.

But you'd really need the right cast to pull it off. Who could be a good Molinari? Fifteen years ago Chazz Palminteri might have been able to, but the actor playing the Mole has to be no older than 50, I think, as well as physically broad (unlike many well-known actors) and able to convey a specifically Italian quality; very few Dick characters I can think of were as specifically ethnic as Gino. Kathy and Eric would be much easier to cast; as long as they avoid Ben Affleck, I'll probably be OK with whoever is cast as Eric. And I'm glad to live in an era when convincing reegs can be created onscreen.

Religious references and themes are very common in PKD's fiction from the very beginning. Both the short stories and the novels. SF in general and PKD perhaps more than any other individual writer except Mark Twain had some significant influence on my religious beliefs in the 60s and 70s. To clarify, SF, PKD and Mark Twain I read during that time was significantly and lastingly influential while since then SF hasn't been especially influential in shaping my beliefs which may just be because the beliefs haven't gone through many major changes since then and even the bigger changes haven't been especially shaped by SF. Partly a matter of my age and of a relative stability of core beliefs after a period of major changes in childhood and young adulthood.

VALIS, the Exegesis and "pink-beam" related stuff hasn't been particularly influential on my beliefs. And I am very mystical, Primary Experience oriented so it's not some reflex reaction against those elements, or more accurately the different presentation of them and explicit references to, and explorations of, PKD's personal mystical experiences of 1974 and later.

BTW, Huston Smith made an interesting comment about SF around 1970 in "Secularization and the Sacred: The Contemporary Scene", a chapter in The Religious Scene editied by Donald Cutler. A revised version can be found as Appendix A in Cleansing the Doors of Perception: The Religious Significance of Entheogenic Plants and Chemicals by Huston Smith (2000).